Charmfall

Sneak was the fall formal of our junior class, and the St. Sophia’s girls in charge—the brat pack—had decided “graveyard glam” was our decorating theme. (The Sneak committee guys at Montclare, our brother school that Jason and Michael both attended, got to do all the audiovisual and electronic stuff.) The idea wasn’t exactly original, but since I was a fan of dark clothes and good eyeliner, I didn’t mind so much. Besides, St. Sophia’s alumnae had rented out the Field Museum, Chicago’s natural history museum, for the party, which was this Friday. I hadn’t been there yet, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but with all that money and all these decorations, there was no way it wasn’t going to look sweet when we were done.

I was pretty excited about the dance. The brat pack, on the other hand, I could do without. Veronica—an every-hair-in-place type of blonde—was their leader. She was currently using a pencil to point other members of the junior class toward their glittery assignments.

I didn’t like her, but I had been paying more attention to her lately. A few weeks ago, Veronica had walked right into the middle of a civil war between two vampire covens that lived in the Pedway—a bunch of passageways that connected buildings in downtown Chicago. Marlena was the reigning coven queen, and she hadn’t been happy that Nicu, a vamp she’d made, had started his own clan. Nicu helped us save Veronica, and something seemed to pass between them. She’d been spelled to lock down her memories of the fight and the meeting, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she was a magical time bomb waiting to go off.

Number two in the brat pack was Amie. She had a bright pink room in my suite but a quiet attitude, and she was currently painting the ravens I’d been assigned to glitter.

Mary Katherine, the third brat packer, whose dark hair was now streaked with yellow spiral curls and tiny rows of rhinestones, was painting her nails a deep shade of blue. At least, I assumed they were rhinestones. Who really knew?

Lesley Barnaby, another suitemate, walked toward me, a bundle of flat, black birds in her hand. She’d been given the task of carting the birds between the brat pack and me. Since their primary goals were being top of the St. Sophia’s food chain and driving me crazy, I was more than happy to let Lesley play middleman.

“More ravens,” she said, setting them down on the floor.

She sat cross-legged beside the stack, a pair of bright rainbow socks reaching up to her knees. She also wore a T-shirt with a rainbow on it and a small pair of fuzzy black cat ears tucked into her blond hair. Lesley had a very unique sense of style.

I liked clothes, and I definitely had an artistic streak. I hated the matchy-match plaid of our school uniforms. But that stuff just made me a teenager. Lesley was an altogether different type of girl. She acted less like a teenager than like a high-fashion model transplanted from some future world, complete with strange clothes and fuzzy expression. The stuff she wore might be really cool in twenty years, but right now it just seemed odd.

“Thanks,” I said, and glanced over at the girls. The brat pack was possibly increasing from three to four. A new recruit, Lisbeth Cannon, had been hanging out with the crew.

“How’s the brat pack?” I asked.

Lesley shrugged. “See for yourself. Veronica’s handing out orders. Amie’s following them. M.K.’s working on her nails.”

“What about Lisbeth?”

“She’s learning how to be like the rest of them.”

I glanced back. As much as I found them repellant, I could admit that I was also kind of intrigued. There was a lot of fighting. They were always pairing off together, leaving one girl out until the other two got mad at each other and decided it was time to switch partners again. Some days I’d find Veronica on the couch in our suite, complaining to Amie about Mary Katherine’s dramatics. M.K. usually complained to Amie that Veronica always had to have her way.

Both complaints seemed right to me.

I was glad to have a steady BFF in Scout, but in an odd way I was a little jealous about the dramatics. What if deciding between BFFs were the only problem I had to face? No magic. No Reapers. No slimy nasties in the tunnels? Just deciding which friend I wanted to wear on any given day.

“You ever wonder what it’s like to be them?”

Lesley looked back at me. “You mean instead of having magic?”

Lesley was one of the few people without magic who was allowed to know about Adepts and Reapers. I wasn’t sure if she knew the entire story, but there was an advantage to not knowing too much—having all the details about the world of underground magic apparently put a Reaper target on your back. Lesley might have been a little odd, but she’d been a friend to us when we needed it, so I certainly didn’t wish that on her.

“I mean to be popular, and for how you look to be the most important thing on your mind.”

Lesley painted lines of glue onto the raven’s feathers. “I play the cello,” she said. “Sometimes I help you and Scout. I speak four languages, I’m super good at physics, and I will probably get into whatever college I want.” She looked up at me, and it was clear she wasn’t bragging. She was just giving me the facts. “So why would I want to spend my time worrying about whether everyone else thinks my shirt is cool enough?”

Like they were following a script, raised voices carried from the brat pack corner of the room.

“I’m trying to do it right,” Lisbeth said. She was attempting to carve a piece of foam into the shape of . . . Well, I’m not really sure what it was supposed to be. A gargoyle, maybe?

Veronica, who’d made her way over to the group, wasn’t buying it. “It certainly doesn’t look like it. You’ve been working on that thing for, like, an hour now.”

“Seriously,” M.K. said. “It looks like an angry terrier, and that’s really off-theme.”

I doubted M.K. cared whether the decoration was right or not. She probably just liked having someone to terrorize. And Lisbeth definitely looked terrorized. She burst into tears and ran from the room, leaving the brat pack rolling their eyes behind her.

“She is so moody,” M.K. complained. “I was just being constructive.”

Lesley and I exchanged a glance.

“See what I mean?” she asked.

I definitely did.

* * *

When the drama was over, we all went back to Sneakifying. Earlier, Veronica, as head of the planning committee, had told us Sneak got its name because St. Sophia’s girls of old used to sneak out every year and host an impromptu prom in an old storage building behind the dorms. (The school used to be a convent, so even the storage building was antiquey and cool.) Add twenty years, lots and lots of money, and parents who didn’t want their heiresses playing dress-up in an old storage building, and you had the modern version of Sneak.

I wasn’t one of those heiresses; I’d been sent to Chicago from my home in New York when my parents went to Germany for research work.

Well, that was their story, anyway. I wasn’t exactly buying it. I thought they knew more about magic than they let on, and that they’d sent me to St. Sophia’s specifically because our headmistress, Marceline Foley, also knew magic existed. It wasn’t something we chatted about regularly, and I don’t think Foley was thrilled to be in the know, but she gave us a little bit of room to take care of business.

I poured glitter over the lines of glue Lesley had made. I’m sure I didn’t exactly look like your average teenager—too much eyeliner and weird vintage shoes for that. But I didn’t exactly look like a teenage witch, either. The only real sign I was anything other than a junior at St. Sophia’s School for Girls was the Darkening on my back, a strangely shaped pale green tattoo that had appeared after I’d been struck by a shot of firespell—and had ended up being able to wield the power, too.

Sure—having power was better than ending up the pitiful victim of a Reaper. But was it better or worse than worrying only whether I was as pretty as the girls in Vogue and if my clothes were hot enough?

Lesley had clearly made up her own mind about that one. Scout had, too. She came from money and could have afforded the same stuff the brat pack wore. But she was one hundred percent Scout, and not the type to worry about what anybody else thought. Keeping the world safe from Reapers was number one on her agenda.

I shook the excess glitter from the raven and put it on the floor beside the others.

“Do you have a date for the dance?” I asked Lesley.

“No. I don’t really know any boys. I’m saving that kind of thing for college.” She looked up at me. “Are you going with Jason?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Do you have a dress yet?”

“Not yet.” Spending my evenings trying to save the world—or at least some of the teenagers who fell victim to Reapers—didn’t leave a lot of time to check out the fashion scene. “Scout and I were going to look this week. What about you?”

She shrugged. “I have some ideas.” She stretched out her legs, revealing a worn pair of Converses. “But I’ll probably go with these. They’re so comfortable. And if we’re going to be dancing all night . . . or running from bad guys . . .”

I looked up at her. “What makes you think we’ll be running from bad guys?”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen television. Bad guys always attack the night of the big dance.”

I made a doubtful sound and grabbed another raven, then sprinkled glitter onto its wings. “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen this time. There will be all sorts of Adepts there, and there’s not a Reaper in town who’d attack a party full of high-society teenagers. They don’t want that much attention.”

At least, that was what I hoped . . .

* * *

It was late when Lesley and I headed back toward the dorms. The rest of the girls had left an hour before we had, but I’d been having too much fun with glitter and glue. We left the decorations in the gym, but I carried back the messenger bag that I took pretty much everywhere. Lesley, bucking the trend again, carried a small round suitcase covered in stickers. It was pea green and looked like something from the 1970s that she’d nabbed from a thrift store. Strange, but a pretty good find, actually.

The walk from the gym to the dorms wasn’t far. The campus was made up of a handful of buildings, and the entire thing was surrounded by a fence with a key-carded gate. Foley’d only just had the gate installed. Probably a good idea even without the Reapers. There were weirdos in every city, and most of the St. Sophia’s girls didn’t have firespell to protect them.

The air outside was cool. Winter was coming, something I definitely wasn’t thrilled about. Winters in upstate New York were nothing to laugh at, but I’d heard the wind off Lake Michigan was pretty miserable. I planned on using the emergency credit card my parents had given me to invest in the thickest, downiest coat I could find. I might look like a lumberjack, but at least I’d be warm.

Lesley and I walked quietly past the classroom building. There was a bench outside, where a girl in St. Sophia’s plaid and a dark-haired boy in street clothes—jeans and a long-sleeved jacket—sat. His arm was around her shoulders, and he was whispering in her ear. She stared blankly ahead while he twirled a lock of her hair. I realized it was Lisbeth, the brat pack’s new recruit.

It wasn’t exactly unusual for St. Sophia’s girls to sneak out of the building to meet with a boy. There was an old root cellar door I’d used to sneak out before—although for world-saving-type reasons.

But this seemed different. There was sadness in her eyes, and while he seemed totally into her, she seemed really, really unhappy about it. She gave off a vibe of desperation. That was quite a change from her brat pack bonding of a little while ago . . . but maybe not from the moodiness they’d accused her of.

When we passed them, I pulled Lesley around the corner of the building, my heart beginning to pound.

“That’s Lisbeth,” I whispered. “Who’s the boy?”

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“Did she seem okay to you?”

“She looked sad. Like she didn’t think she’d ever be happy again.”

That rung a bell. It sounded exactly like the effect of a Reaper stealing someone’s soul. In my two months at St. Sophia’s and as an Adept, I hadn’t actually seen any Reaping. I’d seen the effects—girls at school whose motivation was gone, who seemed depressed, who were tired and sleepy and unhappy all the time. That was the effect of having your soul—your will to live—ripped away by a Reaper intent on keeping his magic.

I glanced around the corner, where the couple still sat, almost motionless except for his fingers raking at her hair. He leaned in like he meant to kiss her . . . but their lips didn’t touch. Instead, he whispered something to her, and as he did, white wisps of smoke began to slip from her mouth and nose.

No, not wisps . . . her soul. It was her energy, her essence, her life’s blood, that was seeping away, and this Reaper was using her for it. That explained her depression. Soon, she’d be little more than a shell of a girl with no hope, no energy, and no interest in anything.

Adults thought hormones made teenagers tired and moody. As if.

My heart pounded with fear, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. This guy—this teenager—was a slow killer, a drainer of energy and taker of things that didn’t belong to him.

He wasn’t even supposed to be doing this. He was too young. I’d been told only adults did the Reaping because they were the only ones who needed the magic. This guy still had all of his powers, so he shouldn’t have needed the extra energy.